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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I’m not sure how many of my readers have heard about the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program being hacked yesterday. The Prescription Monitoring Program is used by pharmacists and others to discover prescription drug abuse. The story gets really interesting since it looks like the hackers encrypted over 8 million patient records and over 35 million prescriptions. Then, the hackers posted the following note on the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program website (according to wikileaks):

“I have your [expletive] In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh :(For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password.”

The website has now been entirely disabled and just times out if you try to visit the site.

The Washington Post blog has reported the following:

Sandra Whitley Ryals, director of Virginia’s Department of Health Professions, declined to discuss details of the hacker’s claims, and referred inquires to the FBI.

“There is a criminal investigation under way by federal and state authorities, and we take the information security very serious,” she said.

A spokesman for the FBI declined to confirm or deny that the agency may be investigating.

Whitley Ryals said the state discovered the intrusion on April 30, after which time it shut down Web site site access to dozens of pages serving the Department of Health Professions. The state also has temporarily discontinued e-mail to and from the department pending the outcome of a security audit, Whitley Ryals said.

“We do have some of systems restored, but we’re being very careful in working with experts and authorities to take essential steps as we proceed forward,” she said. “Only when the experts tell us that these systems are safe and secure for being live and interactive will that restoration be complete.”

Seems interesting that 5 days after they discovered the intrusion the website is still not back online. Must have been a pretty serious hack job.

The Washington Post also explained that this is the second such extortion attack using patient health care data.

In October 2008, Express Scripts, one of the nation’s largest processors of pharmacy prescriptions, disclosed that extortionists were threatening to disclose personal and medical information on millions of Americans if the company failed to meet payment demands. Express Scripts is currently offering a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual(s) responsible for trying to extort money from the company.

Stories like this will set back any sort of RHIO or national HIE movement. Sure makes you think about the security of it all. What is interesting is that the patient data doesn’t seem to have much value outside of extortion. Otherwise, I’d think those who breached the system would have used it in some other way.

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